A Cognitive and Pragmatic Study of Diminutives

The purpose of this paper is to explore some aspects of English diminutives in terms of the cognitive and pragmatic perspective of language. The concatenation of morphological units of morpheme builds up a word whether it is derivational or inflectional. Inflections undertake the syntactic facets of tense for verbs, plural for nouns, and case for nouns. Neither the grammatical category of base word nor its core meaning is changed in inflection by any means

Lexicon and Cognition : A Study of Listed Syntactic Objects

This paper aims at exploring the morphological process of word formation in terms of the analysis of the lexicalization process of syntactic objects. A word has been considered to be composed of morphemes in the syntagmatic stance of morpheme-based morphology. However, this stance has been controversial and the other stance of word-based morphology tends to work today. A phrase oftentimes changes itself into a word in its grammatical category and function. The morphological process of drastic change from phrase to word has not yet been so far discussed in detail. Not only a compound but also a listed syntactic object turns out to be a word which is coined from a phrase in terms of the non-compositional and idiosyncratic process of lexicalization. It is stored in our mental lexicon of brain. It is also a case of morphological creativity in so far as it is coined beyond the affixal (inflectional or derivational) constraints of productivity. Even a sentence sometimes functions as a word as in A God-is-dead theology. In this research we will make a critical discussion at first of the correspondence rules of representational modularity provided by Jackendoff (1997). Second, we will discuss the syntagmatic stance of morpheme-based morphology compared with the paradigmatic stance of word-based morphology. Third, we will discuss a number of conditions of listedness in our mental lexicon in terms of the analysis of lexicalized syntactic objects. Fourth, we will account for the morphological process of lexicalizing syntactic objects in terms of lexical idiomaticity. Fifth, we would like to observe and classify the variety of listed and lexicalized syntactic objects including Sentence, Noun Phrase, Prepositional Phrase, Phrasal Verb and so forth. In the last, we will attempt to claim that lexicalized phrases are the cognitive products of creativity (I.e. non-productive innovation) which is supported by analogy